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"The Spruce Goose, with Hollywood producer-aviator-tycoon Howard Hughes at the controls, makes its first -- and only -- flight, skimming the waters of Long Beach Harbor in California for roughly one minute.

That short hop, made mostly for the benefit of the press and newsreel cameras, was the climax of a story that began more than five years earlier, at the height of World War II.

Appalled at the heavy toll being taken on Allied shipping by the German U-boats, Henry J. Kaiser, builder of the Liberty ships, proposed a fleet of gigantic flying transports to move men and material across the Atlantic. After Kaiser enlisted Hughes' support, the two men sold their idea to the government and walked away with an $18 million contract (about $238 million in today's money) to build three flying boats ...

Because of restrictions on the use of materials deemed critical to the war effort, Hughes built the prototype, HK-1, not out of steel or aluminum but of wood. And while the seaplane would become known worldwide as the Spruce Goose (a name Hughes despised), it was made largely of birch, not spruce ..."

Ah, government contracts.

Actually, it was just a taxi test, and Hughes was forbidden, officially, to let it get airborne. But between the all-out assault on his and the design's reputation due to delays in the project and the understandable urge to just fly the damn thing, he made a very characteristic decision to go for it.
He paid a lot of money to keep it airworthy for many years after that, but it never flew again... I guess he'd made his point.

DaveSims wrote on Feb 29^th, 2008 at 11:01pm:

The experts say there's no reason it couldn't fly as it was designed to do... certainly as lightly loaded as it was for that test.
Remember- even though it was big and heavy, that plane had a very nice wing and eight Wasp Majors, each capable of 3000 hp!! They look small on that plane, but those "corncobs" are huge!!

The only problems discovered on that test flight was some unexpected vibration in the tail section, which probably could have been worked out.

DaveSims wrote on Mar 23^rd, 2008 at 9:31pm:


No, it was aerodynamic, I think...probably caused flexing and twisting of the aft fuselage or something. I'm sure there would be a way to stiffen it without making it too heavy back there... why they never did that, I don't know.
  But those Hughes guys knew what they were doing when it came to conventional stuff like mounting engines, and those were probably the best-matched, mounted and tuned eight engines of type on the planet at the time, so I doubt they were the source of the problem.

That beast was so large and so massive you probably couldn't tell the engines were running if you were in the tail!